ENG 225 Rhetoric and Gaming

Thesis/Purpose: Bour explores how some existing game developers claim that the full extent of potential that can be made out of video games has not been touched on, players are already presenting evidence of significant impact and daily effects in their lives due to video games; therefore, video games contribute to the “social institutionalization (Stöber, 2004: 484–485) of gaming.” Sometimes it can become evident that a game is seen as “a site of struggle (McAllister, 2004).” To build on the matter further, media scholars should separate themselves from the norm and take on a different perspective where they can better understand rhetorical positions in a game. Methods: The study was conducted by looking at games that were on forums that were ranked the most popular using Alexa.com. Each individual forum was scanned using Google search. Google search was used by typing in a variety of keywords that had any sort of connection towards the impact of video games. The very first 100 words...

Greitemeyer, T., Osswald, S., & Brauer, M. (2010). Playing Prosocial Video Games Increases Empathy and Decreases Schadenfreude . American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 10, No. 6, 796 – 802. This article covers two experiments by Greitemeyer, et al, to show levels of malicious pleasure (schadenfreude) after playing games that were rated as “prosocial”, “antisocial”, and “neutral” in regards to the game’s theme. The first experiment used Tetris (Pajitnov, A., 1984) and Lemmings (Psygnosis, 1991) as the neutral and prosocial games, respectively. The participants were then asked how they felt about a celebrity's misfortune. Those who played the prosocial game were more likely to not feel schadenfreude about the celebrity. The second experiment included the antisocial game Lamers (MobyGames, 1992), a parody of Lemmings where the goal is to kill all of the animals, rather than save them. Those who played the antisocial game experienced the highest level of schadenfreude...

Giannakos provides examples of design methodologies for mathematics education in games. The following is my annotation of the paper. This article establishes a system of design rules that create simultaneously educational and serious video games then provides examples of games designed with these methodologies in mind. It uses a wide array of papers related to serious video game design to arrive at the conclusion of 4 different design principles. For serious games to succeed in mathematics education, they must: 1) engage students with a narrative. 2) engage students with familiar game mechanics. 3) allow error to be an opportunity to try again. 4) engage students with collaborative learning. While the experts behind this paper performed no experiment or meta-analysis, they implemented its design rules in a series of games based off of classic video game titles. They first designed a game with narrative that was based off of side scroller video games. Then, they developed a dif...

Backlund, P., & Hendrix, M. (2013). Educational games - Are they worth the effort? A literature survey of the effectiveness of serious games. 2013 5th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES). https://search-proquest-com.unco.idm.oclc.org/docview/304838683?accountid=12832 doi:10.1109/vs-games.2013.6624226 This article discusses the educational effectiveness of game based education, as well as what methods need to go into development of educational and serious games. It defines the differences between Serious games and edutaining games, as well as which aspects of education lend themselves best to game-based learning, such as Mathematics and language learning. This paper is focused on educational games, and was carried out using the frame established by the EduGameLab. The study was limited to games used in formal school settings, and only includes papers  published in scientific journals. Their survey of the research covered...